The fallacy of ‘gun control’

The Washington Post‘s relatively new mantra reminds readers that “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. In the aftermath of the Las Vegas massacre perpetrated by a maniacal individual, who owned unfathomable numbers of weapons and was not on law enforcement radar, we are reminded anew that “Propaganda Thrives in Darkness”. The Post, in Oct. 3 editions and online, underscored this truth by publishing a stunning admission by a former “gun control” advocate, who sheds light on a reality that the newspaper’s editors and readers likely will find unsettling, if not heretical.

The writer, Leah Libresco, of the data-focused journalism site FiveThirtyEight, set out to undertake an exhaustive examination of the more than 33,000 lives ended by guns each year in the United States.

We looked at what interventions might have saved those people, and the case for the policies I’d lobbied for crumbled when I examined the evidence. The best ideas left standing were narrowly tailored interventions to protect subtypes of potential victims, not broad attempts to limit the lethality of guns.

Libresco and her colleagues dug further into the statistics, and arrived at conclusions that will not be articulated in Washington in coming days as lawmakers on the left, longtime advocates of Second Amendment desecration, turn up their heated rhetoric in order to politicize the Las Vegas tragedy.

As my co-workers and I kept looking at the data, it seemed less and less clear that one broad gun-control restriction could make a big difference. Two-thirds of gun deaths in the United States every year are suicides. Almost no proposed restriction would make it meaningfully harder for people with guns on hand to use them.

Sweeping “gun control”, which Democrats are once again demanding, is an empty and unattainable objective, Libresco concludes.

A reduction in gun deaths is most likely to come from finding smaller chances for victories and expanding those solutions as much as possible. We save lives by focusing on a range of tactics to protect the different kinds of potential victims and reforming potential killers, not from sweeping bans focused on the guns themselves.